For a Song and a Hundred Songs
A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
This is the extraordinary prison memoir of one of China's most prominent dissidents and author of the internationally acclaimed The Corpse Walker.
Introduction by Herta Müller, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In June 1989, Liao Yiwu witnessed the Tiananmen Square protest. The young poet, who had until then led an apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that moment and proclaimed his outrage in the poem 'Massacre'.
For a Song and a Hundred Songs captures the four brutal years Liao spent in jail for writing his incendiary poem. He reveals the bleak reality of crowded Chinese prisons, the harassment from guards and fellow prisoners, the torture, the conflicts among human beings in close confinement, and the boredom of everyday life. But even in his darkest hours, Liao manages to find the fundamental humanity in his cellmates.
Liao Yiwu presents a stark and devastating portrait of a nation in flux, exposing a side of China that outsiders rarely get to see. For a Song and a Hundred Songs will forever change the way you view the rising superpower.
Liao Yiwu is a writer, musician, and poet from Sichuan, China. His book of unforgettable life stories from China's underworld, The Corpse Walker, was published by Text in 2011. Liao has received numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious 2012 Peace Prize awarded by the German Book Trade.
textpublishing.com.au
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Exiled Chinese poet Liao (God Is Red) recounts in redolent prose his politicization and imprisonment in the wake of the 1989 government crackdown on the democracy movement centered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Liao was leading a bohemian life amid a lively literary scene in Sichuan Province when news of Tiananmen provoked him to record and distribute his spontaneous protest poem, "Massacre." He soon launched a film project, Requiem, with a handful of colleagues, most of whom were netted in the aftermath of his 1990 arrest, along with other artists. The bulk of the memoir concerns Liao's four-year imprisonment at a series of facilities in the harrowing Chongqing prison system, in which he is usually the rare "'89er" among underprivileged and uneducated criminals. Liao fiercely struggles to maintain his dignity and merely endure, despite little information from his wife (pregnant at the time of his arrest) and family. As his case limps along, scenes of cruelty and degradation are juxtaposed with acts of compassion and moments of release, as in portraits of cellmates and episodes such as the marathon of forced singing that gives the book its title. This vivid and lyrical memoir, a future classic, should have wide appeal as a consummate insider account of Chinese state terror.
